Cold

Been reading a little fiction lately. The level of look and feel I like in a book seems rare. A military SF story didn't have it. A YA fantasy did.

I also played a little Skyrim, with several popular fan-made mods that make the cold and rain (and hunger and disease) a bigger threat than the wolves. And that reminded me that for some details of traveling, working, camping out in the wilds, I don't have to draw from secondary sources. I'm in no risk there of copying what another writer said about how it feels to labor in the cold rain to build a shelter, or to stare into the night waiting on an attack so long, and on so little sleep, the hallucinations begin. I can draw from experience.

There's got to be some advantage to having a few decades of life experience behind me. And it hasn't all been sitting at a computer. (I still wish I had a deeper grasp of the Classics, but even history -- at least at the depth I'm currently grappling with it -- is relatively new to me).




There was -- perhaps still is -- a chance to take a mere gloss of the Bronze Age and write (relatively) generic adventure on top of it. But research has a way of taking over. I just picked up a book on the history of weaving, and have an eye on an excellent book on women's experience in the Bronze Age that, unfortunately for me, comes in at a staggering $170 for hardcopy.

It is basically a fluke of Linear B; how words are constructed in it and how it was employed in the palatial societies, but one of the tiny windows into the lives of ordinary people in the Bronze Age looks upon the lives of women weavers attached to the palace.

And, yes, a similar window, a similar fluke of documentation looks into the community of artisans working in the Valley of Kings. (There's also an unusual bit of paperwork addressing the duties at a Hittite frontier guard post). And, yes, other people have pursued enquiries through these windows, which is why there's some pretty good resources on Mycenae weavers.

All of which is a long way of saying I am increasingly attracted towards writing more towards the mainstream of historical fiction. About people's lives, about their worlds. Less about military exploits with minimal context.



With these kinds of resources -- and with the situation of the Late Bronze Age -- I could elaborate the story of any single character into a novel's width. Their backstories are, currently, more interesting to me than the team-up, and I want to tell them. Even if I end up with three books before the Avengers Assemble.

At the moment, though, one of the few other elements that is coming to clarity is how I want to use magic. To borrow a term from the paper-and-pencil RPG Runequest, no "battle magic." All the cultures I've studied so far have magic that is trivially easy to use -- amulets, cantrips, potions, sacrifices -- but their effects are trivial. Or, at least, subtle. The big stuff, the live-changing prophesies or the resurrection spells or the typhoons and earthquakes take a while to set up. And often as not involve the gods.

There's little cultural equivalent of someone casually flying or throwing a bolt of fire or any of the other easily-accessed, extremely-effective magic of anyone from a Dungeons & Dragons magic-user to the Wicked Witch of the West.

I'm not ruling out the big magic, note. Although I really, really don't want to involve gods.